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CBS Cleans House In Wake of Erroneous Story
An independent review panel gave CBS News a scathing rebuke for its story last fall about President Bush's national guard service. The report noted that in a story that was neither fair nor accurate, and did a "disservice" to the American public, the CBS News staff had a "myopic zeal" to get the story first and gave a "rigid and blind defense" after it aired. The story's producer, Mary Mapes, was fired. Three other executives were asked to resign. The network, noting that he was scheduled for retirement from CBS Evening News in a couple of months, recommended no action be taken against Dan Rather.
Rathergate neither proves, nor disproves, a pervasive liberal bias in the media, as the facts surrounding it are insufficient to such things. It's too small.
:-)
And I don't know how Myers, Greenfield, Glass, etc. disprove the liberal bias idea. They are liberals and they or their staffs did not get in trouble; doesn't that help PROVE the idea? And how does that tie into Rathergate anyway?
And yes, Kelley was worse than Blair, but who reads USA Today regularly? Who trusts it? Who had ever heard of any of the people involved? Sorry, it is necessarily a smaller story than what Blair did, because it was USA Today. Miller's another case, but what she did was -- journalistically -- not nearly as bad as what Blair did. Not even in the same universe.
Back to Rather, the problem is that never before has something like this hit someone so high up as him, and to compound matters, the network denied the truth for two weeks. Add to that the fact that it happened just before an election, and it was a powderkeg.
If that is really from Atrios, well, it's a good reason not to read his work.
That said, it's clear that Mapes herself was anti-Bush. There's no question of it. The story itself -- even assuming all her facts were correct -- is an entire non-story, and yet she was willing to lie to get it told. What did she try to prove? That Bush's ANG attendance record was, for a time, poor? We knew that. It didn't prove he was AWOL, it didn't prove anything more than what we already knew, at best. Why spend so much time and effort on what we already know? The contention was that it was a rush to get a new story, but even stipulating all the evidence as actual facts, it was not a new story.
Even worse than the forged documents, which few have discussed, is the deal with Barnes. What did he have to say, do you recall? That he spoke to an ANG official on Bush's behalf, but that no one asked him to do it, and that he did not know if this had any impact on Bush's entrance into the ANG. And Mapes had spoken to several ANG officials who denied Bush received any preferential treatment, but those quotes were excluded, and she instead framed Barnes' words to give the unmistakable and entirely unsubstantiated impression that Bush did get preferential treatment. Oh yeah, and she neglected to mention Barnes was campaigning heavily for John Kerry. Oops.
Again, even if he did get preferential treatment, I don't consider that significantly newsworthy, and question the bias of anyone who does. But that she not only had no evidence -- not even claims -- that he received preferential treatment, and in fact had only claims that he did not, and still framed it as though he did, is clear and unmistakable evidence of bias.
If all this doesn't prove bias on the part of Mapes, I don't know what possibly could.
I think it's obvious that the people who investigate and report the news are more on the left than on the right by far, and that this bias creeps into the news often. I don't think there's any liberal conspiracy in the media, and that the greatest bias in the media is to get a big story. But this was not Mapes' problem. Sure, there were other pressures, but it's entirely obvious that her goal was to prove her story against the President, and damn the facts, and she deserves to be fired as much as Blair and Kelley and Glass.
Not likely. Republicans would have just blamed the liberal media, just as Democrats are now blaming the liberal media (and exit/internet pollsters) for overstating their position.
"The Media" is a real easy target to blame, because it basically refers to everything that's been said about you and anything that's supposed to alter people's perceptions about you. I mean, on the surface, blaming the media makes sense, but when you look at it a little deeper, The Media is obviously involved in the public's vote, since The Media is essentially what "educates" the public.
Anything you read, even government documents, have been written in such a way as to project an opinion or include a bias. There's no such thing as "unbiased reporting". Some reporting is factually inaccurate (that's why these people are getting fired, or so they say), some reporting is factually accurate but draws incorrect or very shaky conclusions (Michael Moore is basically the champion of this, with sentences like, "Could Bush have been plotting TO KILL YOU?), some reporting is factually accurate and draws correct conclusions when approached by the specific type of bias with which you read the media.
It would have been different because someone else was blaming "The Media", but other than that, probably not.
How about this: some of the documents were an insanely bad forgery. Humorously bad. They were easily recreated in Microsoft Word with the default settings. No settings need to be changed - the default margins, tab-stops, and font all matched up perfectly. Pixel-perfectly.
Some people have suggested that it might be possible to duplicate the memos on equipment available at the time. Well, it's 100% possible to duplicate the memos using Word without changing any settings, to a pixel-perfect degree. Which is more likely?
Even if the documents were true, they were so obviously fake that there's just no way any journalist with integrity could possibly accept them as legit. They may indeed be copies of real reports, but they were obviously not originals.
And when this was pointed out (because it was so freaking obvious), CBS refused to back down on the story, insisting that the documents were real primary sources. Well - they weren't. And now CBS is paying the price for admitting that they made a mistake.
Yeah, it is kinda sad that it took this long for CBS to finally take action on that story. But even if you do support the Democrats, there's no way you should be able to support CBS's action. Nothing Fox News has done has come anywhere near this. There's a difference between being biased in reporting (which both arguably are) and using obviously false sources as primary sources.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Rather apparently had little to do with the initial story, but his behavior over the next two weeks was -- journalistically -- abhorrent, and that is worse than anything he did beforehand.
As to what he did beforehand, I am not sure specifically, but he was involved at least in following the story, encouraging it, etc. Of course, interviewing and such. But Mapes did all the real work.
The problem is YOUR incumbent. MY incumbent is ok, or at least it would prove disastrous to my state to lose his seniority.
Unfortunately, anyone in any state can make this same statement, and feel equally truthful.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.